


Shattered Hope

by AsunderWolf



Category: The Technomancer (Video Game)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 07:02:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11179533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsunderWolf/pseuds/AsunderWolf
Summary: It was so unbearably painful for him to know the truth.As a Technomancer, he had seen small pieces of glorious landscapes picturing long extensions of tender green grass where small, wild yet cute animals ran around. He had witnessed scrapped records of chill breeze moving trees branches gently in complex urban suburbs; cars and bikes, buildings and Institutions beyond the corporations. As if it were a land of wonders, he had seen photos of blue skies that could be cloudy in a matter of minutes, showing a beauty out of this world, a multicoloured sky, a kaleidoscope of colours and clouds.





	Shattered Hope

It was so unbearably painful for him to know the truth.

As a Technomancer, he had seen small pieces of glorious landscapes picturing long extensions of tender green grass where small, wild yet cute animals ran around. He had witnessed scrapped records of chill breeze moving trees branches gently in complex urban suburbs; cars and bikes, buildings and Institutions beyond the corporations. As if it were a land of wonders, he had seen photos of blue skies that could be cloudy in a matter of minutes, showing a beauty out of this world, a multicoloured sky, a kaleidoscope of colours and clouds.

In the most secluded place of the Technomancer school, there was a museum of invaluable old artefacts with these secrets, with the small scraps of a better world left behind. It had such wonders that some were hard to believe, like those records of rain, water falling from the sky, and people complaining about such magical event. Water in extended regions called oceans, lakes, rivers. Water on the planet surface that did not evaporate in a couple of seconds. It was so hard to believe a world like that existed, especially a world that was supposed to be theirs, a world that was supposed to be free of corporations controlling it.

Among the relics were books explaining things like seasons. It was too much to handle, even for them: simple Martians. What could it be to have different seasons in different moment of a year?. Snow? Green trees turning into red and yellow?, colourful springs? Flowers!. Things that looked like magic. Like a fairy tale.

The first explorers arrived Mars carrying with them mementos of the world left behind, pictures and videos in devices that displayed their family on Earth, walking under the Sun, exploring mountains surrounded by snow, or having happy picnics on fresh green grass. Everything was so colourful in those videos, and people was not afraid of the Sun. That was unthinkable for Martian humans.  How could they have chosen to leave all that behind for this dead planet?.

Zachariah sighed. All those fragments of the past had inspired the Technomancers making them grow desperate to find more and more pieces of that shattered heaven. The existence of that world out there gave them hope to endure all what they had to, because after all the torture and training and madness, they knew that a better world could exist. It was not a naive dream crafted to resist another day of Technomancy.

Technomancers were not like the rest of the people on Mars who had no “proof” about those wonderful times on Earth. They knew that planet was a living heaven, a place that every Technomancer secretly wished to visit at least once before dying. It was the last desire for those who lived always in the edge of insanity, fighting and bleeding in the name of heartless Corporations, without no real, personal purpose, without acceptance inside them nor outside them. It was a place that could embrace them, without logos, offering them natural, pleasant sounds, green grass, free water. A place where they were not needed anymore, where they would not be crafted anymore. A world worth the trouble of finding it.

That was why Technomancers were so ridiculously reckless when it was about ancient ruins related to the first explorers. They did not care about tremendous beasts nesting in those ruins; the slightest chance of knowing how to return to the Eden was worth dying.

But then, the truth of an Earth reduced to dust had been too much to bear.  

All those green and colourful images, the videos about familial picnics, the snow, the rain, the summer days…. Everything was shattered alongside that small ring of asteroids floating in the void of the space. Hope had just vanished.

The childish innocent belief that there was a heaven out there disappeared, and the truth that everything they got was that dry, hostile, red planet was immensely disappointing and frustrating.

Zachariah had to start accepting a planet he never liked. It was not the planet where the human specie had been born, it was not gentle, refreshing, delightful. It was not alike those recordings he had seen once. And that was so hurtful. His beloved Earth, that place which inspired him nostalgia even though he had never truly tasted it, was a hope to go on.

But he had to forget and embrace Mars as it was, for it was all what he had, it was all what they, humans, had.

He smirked bitterly. _Humans_. He kept forgetting that. The small detail that technomancers were not even humans.

  


The first weeks after the truth, Zachariah could not leave his wrecked chair placed at a corner of his small shack in Mutant Valley. He only could look through the rusty window into the walls of the canyon that protected them from the immense desert outside. Sandstorms, burning sunbeams, extremely dry and hot wind. Nothing alike.  _Nothing_ . 

The “greenest” plant in that place was a mutant kind-of-fungi tree that was brown and half withered, growing in middle of the city. It provided them a broad shadow but it had a slight rotten stench. Or maybe it was the whole city and its inhabitants.

He could not help but feeling anger when that lame plant was contrasted with those videos he had found in that Technomancer museum, displaying a visit to a place called Amazons. And waterfalls. It was unbelievable for any Martian to think of water falling without being evaporated instantly before reaching the ground.

  
Andrew crossed the door and looked at Zachariah for a couple of seconds. He went to the closet, or what was supposed to be one, and took a tore towel that rubbed against his sweaty neck. He threw the bag that he was holding over the bed, and took a bottle of water that drank in a minute. He offered Zachariah another one. “You can’t be this way the rest of your life”.  He said.

Zachariah only moved his eyes to gave him a short and a bit threatening look while taking the bottle. What could he say?. Andrew was a technomancer just in an informal, maybe symbolic way. He had never seen the endless amount of relics he had; Andrew could not even imagine how wonderful and perfect had been the Earth. He could not mourn a place he had never ever suspected its existence. 

“The rest are the same”, Andrew continued, placing another wrecked chair beside Zachariah. He looked through the windows. He had just paid a visit to the other technomancers, who were as broody and melancholic as Zachariah. “Was it so important?. I mean, sure, no person in this planet wants to stay here if there were another offering, but… it was not like we were close to leaving this planet anyway.”

Silence.

Zachariah only sighed.

Andrew blinked and insisted, “Or was there some secret plan about it?”

“No. It’s just… we saw it. We saw what it could have been. Relics showed us-”

“Ok. I don’t want to heard.”

Surprised, Zachariah looked at the other man for a second. Maybe Andrew was afraid to start mourning something that he did not even imagined. He could not blame him. If he had the chance, he would have chosen to never know about that lost Eden.

Zachariah opened the bottle and drank a bit of water. It had an earthy, rusty taste.  

“But, again… you can’t be this way forever.” Andrew insisted. 

“What should I do? Aurora and Abundance want me dead. I can’t turn into a merchant and go to Noctis, risking retaliation, and here… well. Phobos is in charge. He is who decides how things change among mutants… and even though we are all the same… we are not.”

Andrew snorted. “My, the way to get bitter.”

Zachariah frowned. “Sorry. I don’t know how you feel about being a mutant not-so-mutant”.

“Well, pretty much as myself.” he sighed. “It’s not new, Zach. We always were the freak. A bit freakier won’t change things. Hey, cheer up. We are alive, and free. And I tell you, that means a lot.” 

Zachariah looked at him with a bit mistrustful, “I wonder why sometimes you are so bitter and some times so optimistic”.

Andrew giggled. “It depends of the person at my front.”


End file.
